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Commentary & Analysis

In timely and incisive analysis, our experts parse the latest development news and devise practical solutions to new and emerging challenges. Our events convene the top thinkers and doers in global development.

How do entrepreneurs learn whether they have what it takes to manage larger businesses? It's likely through experimentation. In this paper, Dean Karlan, Ryan Knight, and Christopher Udry develop a model to help understand the impediments to experimentation and the benefits to giving it a try.

Latin America is known for high levels of inequality, which governments can lessen somewhat through smart policy. In this paper, Nora Lustig and others analyze how and whether taxes, subsidies, and social spending reduce inequality across countries in the region and identify which policies are most beneficial.

In this paper, Saugato Datta and non-resident fellow Sendhil Mullainathan explore the implications of behavioral economics in policy areas as diverse as health, education, agricultural policy, and the design of cash-transfer programs.

Reliance on natural resource revenues, particularly oil, is often associated with bad governance, corruption, and poverty. Worried about the effect of oil on Alaska, Governor Jay Hammond had a simple yet revolutionary idea: let citizens have a direct stake. Thirty years later, Hammond’s vision is still influencing oil policies throughout the world.

“This important book sets a sensible and specific way forward. It should be read by all involved in economic development and international action on climate change.”
—Lord Nicholas Stern, author of the Stern Review

Middle-income countries are now home to most of the world’s extreme poor and to what Andy Sumner calls the “buoyant billions”—those living on between $2 and $10 a day. Sumner follows the trends and implications.

India’s Universal ID program seeks to provide a unique identity to all 1.2
billion residents. Its
successes and potential failures will have far-reaching implications for other
developing countries looking to create national identity systems.